NASA APOD Scraper

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🎯 What this scrapes

NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (apod.nasa.gov) is one of the longest-running and most beautiful image series on the web. This Actor wraps its official API (api.nasa.gov/planetary/apod), supporting single-date, date-range, and random-pick modes, and writes one row per APOD with the description, image / video URL, and credits.

🔥 What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes so the target sees a browser, not Python.
• 🌐 Residential proxy rotation via Apify Proxy — fresh session and exit IP on every block.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 5xx — up to 5 attempts per page, Retry-After honoured.
• 🧱 Rate-limit-aware pacing — when the target pushes back, we slow down instead of getting banned.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

💡 Use cases

• Wallpaper rotation — pull today's APOD daily and push to a desktop-wallpaper service.
• Educational pipelines — backfill the full APOD archive into a CMS for a school site.
• Newsletter — send a daily image with explanation to subscribers.
• Generative art seeds — feed APOD images + captions into a multimodal model.

⚙️ How to use it

1. Click Try for free at the top of the page.
2. Fill in the input form — most fields have sensible defaults.
3. Click Start. Output streams into the run's dataset.
4. Export from Storage → Dataset as JSON, CSV, or Excel — or fetch via the API.

📥 Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Notes
mode	string	no	'range'	How to choose APODs.
date	string	no	'—'	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD). The earliest APOD is 1995-06-16.
startDate	string	no	'—'	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD). Range inclusive on both ends.
endDate	string	no	'—'	ISO date (YYYY-MM-DD).
count	integer	no	5	How many random APODs.
apiKey	string	no	'—'	Get one at api.nasa.gov. Without one we use DEMO_KEY (30 req/hour, 50 req/day).
thumbsForVideos	boolean	no	True	Adds thumbnail_url for video APODs (YouTube/Vimeo).
proxyConfiguration	object	no	{'useApifyProxy': False}	NASA's API is open. Proxy optional.

Example input

{
  "mode": "today",
  "thumbsForVideos": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": false
  }
}

📤 Output

Every row is one dataset item.

Field	Type	Notes
date	string	APOD date (YYYY-MM-DD).
title	string	Title of the APOD entry.
explanation	string	Long description text.
url	string	Image or video URL.
hdurl	['string', 'null']	HD image URL when available.
thumbnail_url	['string', 'null']	Video thumbnail (when applicable).
media_type	string	image or video.
copyright	['string', 'null']	Credit / copyright string.
service_version	['string', 'null']	NASA API service version.
apod_url	string	Canonical APOD page URL on apod.nasa.gov.
scraped_at	string	When this row was recorded.

Example output

{
  "date": "2026-05-15",
  "title": "Spiral Galaxy NGC 1232",
  "media_type": "image",
  "url": "https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/2605/NGC1232.jpg",
  "copyright": "ESO; J. Spyromilio",
  "apod_url": "https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap260515.html"
}

💰 Pricing

Pay-Per-Event — you pay only when these events fire:

Event	USD	What it is
actor-start	$0.005	One-off warm-up charge per run
result	$0.0015	Per dataset item

Example: 1 000 results at the rates above ≈ $1.50. No subscription, no minimum, no card to start — Apify gives every new account $5 of free credit.

🚧 Limitations

We surface NASA's API as-is. We don't proxy NASA's images — the url field points to apod.nasa.gov / external hosts. The thumbnail_url is provided by NASA only for some video entries.

❓ FAQ

Do I need an API key?

Not for small volumes. DEMO_KEY works but is shared and rate-limited. Get your own free key at api.nasa.gov for unlimited fairness.

Why are some entries video?

Some APODs are videos (rocket launches, animations). media_type=video and url points to YouTube/Vimeo.

Can I bulk-download images?

We give you the URL; pair with a generic file-download Actor or curl loop.

What's the earliest APOD?

1995-06-16.

💬 Your feedback

Spotted a bug, hit a weird edge case, or need a new field? Open an issue on the Actor's Issues tab on Apify Console — we ship fixes weekly and we read every report.

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